Posted on 11/26/2007 4:23:00 PM PST by Richard Poe
by Richard Lawrence Poe Monday, November 26, 2007 |
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MOST AMERICANS never heard of Saul Alinsky. Yet his shadow darkens our coming election. Democrat frontrunners Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama both worship at the altar of Alinskyism.
In a 1971 book called Rules for Radicals, Alinsky scolded the Sixties Left for scaring off potential converts in Middle America. True revolutionaries do not flaunt their radicalism, Alinsky taught. They cut their hair, put on suits and infiltrate the system from within.
Alinsky viewed revolution as a slow, patient process. The trick was to penetrate existing institutions such as churches, unions and political parties.
In his native Chicago, Alinsky courted power wherever he found it. His alliance with prominent Catholic clerics, such as Bishop Bernard Sheil, gave him respectability. His friendship with crime bosses such as Frank Nitti Al Capones second-in-command gave Alinsky clout on the street.
In our book The Shadow Party: How George Soros, Hillary Clinton and Sixties Radicals Siezed Control of the Democratic Party, my co-author David Horowitz and I trace the rise of Alinskys political influence since the 1930s.
He excelled at wooing wealthy funders. Start-up money for his Industrial Areas Foundation a training school for radical organizers came from department-store mogul Marshall Field III, Sears Roebuck heiress Adele Rosenwald Levy, and Gardiner Howland Shaw, an assistant secretary of state for Franklin Roosevelt.
Alinsky once boasted, I feel confident that I could persuade a millionaire on a Friday to subsidize a revolution for Saturday out of which he would make a huge profit on Sunday even though he was certain to be executed on Monday.
One Alinsky benefactor was Wall Street investment banker Eugene Meyer, who served as Chairman of the Federal Reserve from 1930 to 1933. Meyer and his wife Agnes co-owned The Washington Post. They used their newspaper to promote Alinsky.
Agnes Meyer personally wrote a six-part series in 1945, praising Alinskys work in Chicago slums. Her series, called The Orderly Revolution, made Alinsky famous. President Truman ordered 100 reprints of it.
During the Sixties, Alinsky wielded tremendous power behind the scenes.
When President Johnson launched his War on Poverty in 1964, Alinsky allies infiltrated the program, steering federal money into Alinsky projects.
In 1966, Senator Robert Kennedy allied himself with union leader Cesar Chavez, an Alinsky disciple. Chavez had worked ten years for Alinsky, beginning in 1952. Kennedy soon drifted into Alinskys circle.
After race riots shook Rochester, New York, Alinsky descended on the city and began pressuring Eastman-Kodak to hire more blacks. Kennedy supported Alinskys shakedown. The two men had an understanding, Alinsky later wrote.
Alinskys crowning achievement was his recruitment of a young high school student named Hillary Rodham. She met Alinsky through a radical church group. Hillary wrote an analysis of Alinskys methods for her senior thesis at Wellesley College. They remained friends until Alinskys death in 1972.
Alinsky tried to hire Hillary as a community organizer, but she chose instead to attend Yale Law School. Nonetheless, Alinskys network continued guiding Hillarys career.
Fresh out of law school at age 26, Hillary received a prestigious appointment to the House Judiciary Committees Watergate investigative team in 1974. She got the job on the recommendation of Peter and Marian Wright Edelman.
The Edelmans have been trusted mentors of Hillary since 1969. New Republic editor Martin Peretz called Marian Hillarys closest sister and ideological soulmate. Marian Wright Edelman also happens to be an Alinskyite, having served on the Board of Trustees of Alinskys Industrial Areas Foundation.
Many leftists view Hillary as a sell-out because she claims to hold moderate views on some issues. However, Hillary is simply following Alinskys counsel to do and say whatever it takes to gain power.
Barack Obama is also an Alinskyite. Trained by Alinskys Industrial Areas Foundation, Obama spent years teaching workshops on the Alinsky method. In 1985 he began a four-year stint as a community organizer in Chicago, working for an Alinskyite group called the Developing Communities Project. Later, he worked with ACORN and its offshoot Project Vote, both creations of the Alinsky network.
Camouflage is key to Alinsky-style organizing. While trying to build coalitions of black churches in Chicago, Obama caught flak for not attending church himself. He became an instant churchgoer.
That Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama share an Alinskyite background tells us two things. First, they are leftists, dedicated to overthrowing our Constitutional system. Second, they will go to any length to conceal their radicalism from the public.
That is the Alinsky method. And that is todays Democratic Party.
Richard Lawrence Poe is a contributing editor to Newsmax, an award-winning journalist and a New York Times bestselling author. His latest book is The Shadow Party: How George Soros, Hillary Clinton and Sixties Radicals Siezed Control of the Democratic Party, co-written with David Horowitz. | |
Please let me know if you want ON or OFF of my Hillary ping list.
.....And Schools, Schools, Schools!
self ping
and the government...
Our two home-educated girls wrote a better research paper than Hillary did at Wellesley. At the time they were 12 & 13.
It isn’t just Hitlery and Obambi who slavishly march to an Alinsky drumbeat, but pretty much the whole of the leadership cadre of the Democratic party and its key supporters and financiers are also in lockstep. The only major difference between the modern Democratic party and the communists of the Stalin era is the Dems are abject cowards.
read
For what it’s worth, my personal theory is that Hitlery’s thesis embraces Alinsky’s goals but rejects his methods as too passive. I think that in actual practice Hitlery vastly prefers the methods of Stalin and Hitler to grass roots collective populism.
Nevertheless, thanks for laying out the beliefs of a man that Hitlery and the rest of the left certainly admire.
Thanks for the ping Richard.
I really like that one, potlatch!
It’s GREAT!
Thanks again, that’s from waaay back when he winked at her!!
Nailed it.
It's just that morbid fascination we all have, like staring into the eyes of the Great White in the aquarium shark tank, knowing that there may be enough foreign and domestic slackjaws wielding electoral hammers to break the glass and get us all eaten.
A number of times here in Calfornia, I have attended meetings organized by People Acting in Community Together (PACT), an Alinskyesque organization focused on ‘immigration rights.’ Looking at Hillary’s recent meltdowns, it occurs to me that a major weakness of the Alinsky system is its stagecraft. As long as it is able to lash out without consequence, there is no more powerful medium for opinion-making and influence. However, the moment the message loses its protective bubble, that is to say its obsessive situational control, it falls apart. It simply cannot challenge another position on an intellectual or pragmatic level, even when it is on sound ground.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/827844/posts?page=167#167
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stepping back in time...
(http://archive.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2003/1/22/173051.shtml )
UPDATED Thread:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/827844/posts
“Sen. Clinton a Threat to U.S. Security
softwar ^ | Thursday, Jan. 23, 2003 | Charles R. Smith”
Posted on 01/23/2003 12:48:52 AM PST by backhoe
Edited on 01/23/2003 1:02:12 AM PST by Jim Robinson. [history]
Thanks for the ping and article, Mr. Poe.
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BUMP this thread.
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